List of the demos

Numeric Pad – a numeric keypad built using tilt tiles and a tilt wall with nice fluid animations in.

Dynamic Backgrounds – as mentioned in a previous blog post, this demo shows how to use SharpDx and Direct2D to create dynamic backgrounds for your app

Animated Gifs – using SharpDx to get to the WIC and D2D libraries we can go above and beyond what Silverlight/XNA could ever offer and build our own media experiences . In this case implement the animated gif in xaml ourselves. A previous blog post covered this demo..

Composite Modes – shows you how to implement different composite modes for when you try composing textures on a Direct2D surface. The ideas also translate to how you would compose on a D3D surface.

Lighting Effects – using D2D and build in effects to show how to create cool lighting effects. This previous post covers this demo .

Ripple + Pixelated custom effects – again using D2D and effect graphs we show how to create custom effects (ripple/pixelated) and graph them together to create cool effects. A previous post covers this demo.

Ribbon – playing around with the idea of a metro ribbon and how it would feel like using it. This previous post covers this demo …

Data Entry – experimenting with creating my data entry forms using a quick metadata driven approach, using reflection. The reason for this is that configuring D2D Effects of D3D settings for your scene would take a lot of xaml configuration screens, I was hoping for a very quick meta-data driven approach to creating these screens.

Inertial Dots – introducing the conductor and inertial controls. 2 new controls that I hope to leverage a lot in future UI/UX’s as they deliver some cool animated effects . I talked about this demo in a previous post.

Cube – a 3D cube rendered using SharpDx via Direct3D

Cube Wall – playing around with rendering 300+ textured cubes using an imagebrush

Tile Texture – I want to experiment with creating cool metro tiles, this demo is the precursor to that. The idea was to create a simple tile on a Dx surface that I will later play around with

Tile Wall – just like the “Tile Texture” demo , this is a wall of tiles that I hope to use in the future to experiment with a wall of metro tiles.

Bursting Circles 1 & 2 – A batch of circles that are being batch rendered on a Dx surface via D3D and SharpDx. These 2 demos are purely experiments on ideas I have for building out my own Sprite Batch, this is teaching me about things like caching on the GPU, Vertex/Pixel shader constants, the right types of lists to use for best performance, type of blending to use etc. Lost of learning is going on with these 2 demos ..

Demo Code

[please note that this will be updated when I have time to, I am quite busy and this is a side project. ]

Conclusion

I’m having a lot of fun coding on top of WinRT XAML using SharpDx and C#. [again a big thank you to Alexandre Mutel who owns the SharpDx project ]

It’s all about using the technologies that you find most rewarding, and for me that is XAML (Silverlight, WPF, XAML) and DirectX …

It’s clear to me that mixing XAML and DirectX is how we are going to deliver those amazing UI/UX’s that we see in movies, and they may not make sense in business apps today BUT I honestly believe in x years time we wont’ be having this argument..

Get the experience under your belt today with 2D, 3D, XAML, you won’t regret it in the future!

And in respect to HTML, I seriously can’t see web technologies delivering us the amazing UI/UX’s that we see in movies, and that’s all I want to be doing! So power to all you web programmers out there, but for me XAML and DirectX all the way!